An introduction to T4 templates

1. T4

2. Overture Level 01-01-02 Interactive On the Menu What it is? Demo Alternatives Learning’s

3. T4 is NOT and of these You may feel like Skynet was built with T4 sometimes

4. TLA What does T4 stand for? Text Template Transformation Toolkit Three Two Letter Acronym

5. Why do we need it? Cause developers are expensive and Xbox games are fun

6. History Something is missing here…

7. A word of warning… Out of the box tooling DOES NOT EXIST It’s notepad + command line basically 3rd parties can make the pain go away I use the free stuff from Tangible & T4 Toolbox You will too, accept that and move on

8. Is this thing used? ASP.MVC uses T4 templates for views and controllers DSL tools in VS 2010 use it BizTalk Architecture Tools 3rd Party uses like LINQ to SQL replacement

9. High Level Plan XAML CSV Template Code Output T4 toolkit .NET Framework C# HTML VB

10. Demoslike the moon landing Demos take lots of preparation, learning new skills and mostly faking it

11. What haven’t you seen? Build integration Pre-processed Templates

12. Alternatives CodeDOM Part of .NET Used internally by T4 More powerful Harder to learn Ideally for language scenarios

13. Alternatives CodeSmith Third Party $$$ More rugged tooling, debugging features

14. Alternatives NVelocity Port of Java’s Jakata Velocity Free Wildly different syntax

15. Alternatives Hire a monkey Maybe this is why you were hired…

16. Help?

17. Learning's Search for T4AND Visual Studio Text Template Use the Tangible T4 editor Use the T4 Toolkit Make use of scratch applications in prototyping For use within Visual Studio

18. Questions robertm@bbd.co.za www.sadev.co.za @rmaclean